1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns a method for maintaining a set comprising at least two components in the group comprising a rim, a tire mountable on said rim and a safety support for at least partially supporting a tread of said tire under reduced or zero pressure conditions. The invention also concerns a device and machine for implementing the method.
2. Description of Related Art
Automatic tire mounting/removal machines are already known, making it possible to perform both operations of mounting a tire and possibly a safety support on a rim of an automobile wheel, and operations of removing the tire and possibly a safety support with respect to the wheel rim, with a view to the repair or replacement of the tire and possibly the safety support. Machines of this type are for example described in the documents EP 1 177 920 (counterpart U.S. Pat. No. 6,619,362 is incorporated herein by reference) and EP 1 253 026 (counterpart U.S. Pat. No. 6,854,950 is incorporated herein by reference).
In fact, the known machines of this type are not completely automatic. This is because, before each mounting or removal operation, the operator allocated to the machine must manually enter, for example by means of a keyboard, the information concerning the various components of the wheel or the wheel itself to be mounted or removed, in particular the information corresponding to the dimensions and type of the wheel, for example the inside diameter of the tire, the outside diameter, and the width B of the tire, the ratio H/B of the tire, the type of mounted assembly (conventional, PAX® or self supporting, often referred to as ZP, standing for “zero pressure”), or any other information vital to the adjustment of the machine and/or the maintenance that is to be carried out by the tire mounting/removal machine.
Such a manual entry of information by an operator takes a certain amount of time and, despite all the care given to the entering, this may be a source of error. In the event of error in entering, immobilisation of the mounting/removal machine and/or a longer immobilisation of the vehicle of the customer and/or physical damage to the wheel in the course of mounting or removal may result therefrom and/or, more seriously still, if a defect in mounting occurs and this is not detected before re-use of the wheel, serious accidents during the driving of the vehicle may occur.
The aim of the present invention is therefore to provide a method for effecting a maintenance, in particular, but not exclusively, an operation of mounting or removal of a tire on or from a wheel rim, said method being amenable to being implemented automatically, without it being necessary to manually enter the information essential for carrying out the desired maintenance, and therefore avoiding errors in entering and the harmful consequences thereof.
Moreover, automobile wheels are already known whose components, namely the rim, tire and any safety support comprise respective identification elements that can be verified automatically in order to allow, after mounting or assembly of the components on a vehicle wheel, checking of the components in order to verify that they are indeed compatible with each other and, in the case of incompatibility, to generate an appropriate alarm signal (see in this regard U.S. Pat. No. 6,717,512, which is incorporated herein by reference and which is a counterpart to PCT international patent application publication WO 02/09957).
Automobile wheels are already known, the wheel or tire of which is provided with a pressure monitoring system, comprising a pressure sensor and/or a pressure variation detector, as well as a management module configured to receive and process information supplied by the pressure sensor and/or pressure variation detector, and an emitting module for transmitting to a receiver independent of the wheel the information analysed and processed by the management module. In particular, the following PCT international patent application publications are noted in this regard: WO 02/34551 (counterpart U.S. Pat. No. 6,917,285 is incorporated herein by reference); WO 02/34552 (counterpart U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0234041 is incorporated herein by reference); and WO 03/34553 (counterpart U.S. Pat. No. 6,880,394 is incorporated herein by reference). According to circumstances, the information transmitted to the receiver is used to warn the driver of an automobile of an abnormality, such as for example insufficient pressure inside the tire cavity, a puncture, a rapid loss of pressure, or a burst, or to serve as parameters for a vehicle driving aid device, such as for example a device of the ESP type, a device of the brake anti-lock type (ABS) or a device of the anti-skid type.
However, none of the aforementioned documents teaches how to resolve the technical problem that is at the basis of the present invention, namely avoiding errors in entering and the harmful consequences thereof, in a method and machine for carrying out maintenance on a set comprising at least two components from the group comprising a rim, a tire mountable on said rim and a safety support intended to at least partially support a tread of said tire under reduced or zero pressure conditions.